


Three Of A Kind

by EliMorgan



Series: Here We Go Again; MMFBingo19 [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, MMF Bingo, Multi, Post-Avengers (2012), Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Triad - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2019-08-05
Packaged: 2020-08-10 01:16:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20126968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EliMorgan/pseuds/EliMorgan
Summary: Tony wasn't expecting a soulmate, not at his age - but Fate has other plans.





	Three Of A Kind

**Author's Note:**

> **I do not own the works made use of herein, none of the Harry Potter/Marvel universe features or characters belong to me. I make no money from this work.**
> 
> Hi!
> 
> This is written in a Soulmate!AU in which soulmates switch bodies on their thirtieth birthday. I cannot remember the source for this idea, but if someone knows where it originated, please let me know so that I can credit them!
> 
> I'm filling G4 on my MMF Bingo 19 card with this one. 4th July 2014 is MCU canon as Steve's thirtieth, though I think he's younger in the comics. I've gone with that one , however, and I'm ignoring anything past the first Avengers film.
> 
> Enjoy!  
Eliza x

**4th July, 2014**

Tony had never expected a soulmate. Not for poignant, angsty reasons - he had enough of those for every other part of his life - but simply because he couldn’t imagine a single person in the world could be his perfect match. Not to be all ‘Loki’ about it, but one had to admit; there weren’t many _ other _genius, playboy, billionaire philanthropists in the world.

Some people came close - he’ll always consider Pepper his platonic soulmate, for all that she spent half of her life exasperated with him, and the Lewis girl wasn’t too bad, if only she’d stop shovelling food down his throat - but no-one was _ perfect _. And he would know, he had spent most of his life bed-hopping in an attempt to find at least one person he might have a spark with.

So that might not be the best way to do it - who cared? He had fun.

When his thirtieth birthday came around, however, and he didn’t swap, he couldn’t deny a twinge of… irritation, maybe? Not _ sadness _. It just seemed ridiculous that out of seven billion people on the planet, not a single one of them could be considered anything close to his equal.

Then, of course, he turned that on it’s head and made it a good thing.

_ Out of seven billion people, not one of them could be his equal. _

There was a sense of freedom in not having a soulmate. No-one to impress, no-one to wait for. He couldn’t be held accountable for his life so far because he should have been making it the best he could in order to accommodate this new person. Rhodey had spent a long time trying to get his shit together for his ‘special someone’, despite how a soulmate is supposed to love you for who you are, and, honestly, the whole process seemed depressing.

So, Tony had come to terms with his lack of mate. If he flinched whenever a close friend met theirs, he didn’t acknowledge it. If he’d left the tower for an impromptu visit to LA on the day that Bruce had turned up to work with a British playboy filling his body, then no-one mentioned it. 

If he still kept that notebook he’d written when he was twenty-nine, secretly, hidden in the bottom drawer of his bedside cabinet, with even more confidential orders to JARVIS hidden in his programming, then…

Well, no-one would know. 

* * *

Understandably, he was shocked to find himself waking up in someone else’s body. He was _ forty-four_; if he was far too old for whiskey benders (as Pepper continually tried to convince him), then surely he was far too old to prance about in someone else’s body for the day? 

It was a nice body, he had to admit. Spry. Annoyingly wide-awake at six in the morning, with this frustrating ache in his limbs that, to him, seemed to demand exercise.

A flat no, on that one. Tony wasn’t averse to the occasional work out - he had to keep in Iron Man shape, after all - but _ running? _That was what hydraulics were for.

A nice body in a nice bed, he realised, second of all. The mattress was semi-hard, but good quality, even though whoever slept in it seemed to have decided they had no need for a quilt, instead using some scratchy blanket that was - he checked the label - _ ugh _ , a _ blend _.

Nice legs, though. Firm. Muscular. Same for the chest - broad shoulders, firm, rippling muscles…

Tony was interrupted in his quest beneath his pyjamas by a shrill ringing. Snorting in disgust, he flipped over, surprised to find one of the newer Stark phones on the bedside table. It was an unknown number.

“Stark,” he barked, out of habit, as he traced a line down his mate’s pecs. Then froze. Because his voice was _ disturbingly _familiar…

“Tony?” said a woman’s voice. He didn’t recognise it, but it sounded like the sort of woman he would dodge - crisp, businesslike, impatient. “What are you doing in my body?”

“Wrong number,” he snapped, then hung up, flipping out of the bed - _ that speed! - _ to run to the bathroom. Yep. There, in the full-length mirror he’d paid thousands of dollars for, stood Steve Rogers. Captain America. Octogenarian good boy. Good ol’ Cap.

Wasn’t that a kick in the face?

_ Steve could probably kick himself in the face. _

Nope. Not trying that right now. 

The phone was ringing again, insistently, but Tony ignored it. If he was in _ Cap’s _ body, then Cap was in his. _ Disaster. _ Cap was so polite and kind and _ righteous _ , what if he accidentally did something _ wholesome _, and someone saw it? 

Tony’s reputation would be _ruined_.

Pulling on a shirt seemed a shame, and difficult, too, but Tony managed it, partly, before charging - _ speedy! - _out of Cap’s sad, militaristic apartment and into the elevator. “JARVIS, show me the penthouse,” he barked, still struggling with the sleeves. 

"Yes, Sir." Tony didn't even stop to question how JARVIS knew. He'd been made that way. Instead, he focused on the scene blown up on the wall beside him. 

His body was sat in his bed, frowning at a battered black book that made his heart clench in his chest. The bed was neatly made, but his body was still dressed in the clothes he'd fallen into bed in the night before; oil spattered jeans and a tee-shirt. It was strange, to watch himself and know it wasn't him inside there. His whole posture seemed wrong, more upright, uncomfortable. Whoever it was kept crossing and uncrossing their legs with an agitated shift. 

What had he written in there? A load of nonsense, as far as he recalled. Sometimes, over the years, he'd added to it - drunkenly, miserably. At the end were a bunch of alcohol soaked letters to the soulmate he didn't think existed. 

He shuddered to think of them now. And to think that _ Cap _was the one reading them. 

The doors slid open and he was in his penthouse, pausing in the doorway. Did he want to do this? Knowing was one thing, surreptitiously watching on the camera another, but actually confronting the person inhabiting his body?

The realisation that he was in Cap's body - and therefore he was in _ his_, had pushed the whole soulmate situation to the back burner, but it came rushing back now. _ Steve Rogers was his soulmate. _

Yet another kick in the face. He was definitely going to try that at some point today, just to spite the man. Right before bed, probably. That way, Rogers would wake up to the pain and know exactly how Tony felt. 

* * *

Hermione hadn't expected this when she'd woken up that morning. 

Of course, she should have, on some level. Having spent her entire life being a mum to her two best friends and ahead of her peers in the maturity stakes, she'd always thought she'd find an older man, but she supposed that could easily be interpreted the other way around; that she was perfectly disposed to be the soulmate of a younger man. Certainly, aside from Viktor, every man she had ever dated was younger than her, if not in one way, then another.

She hasn't thought, however, that she'd wake up in the body of a man obviously significantly older than her, not when she was this far past her own thirtieth. 

"Good morning," a pleasant voice greeted her as she floated into consciousness. Her eyes slammed open, and she groped desperately for her wand; even harder when she realised that the voice was disembodied.

"My apologies for frightening you," the voice continued, a tinny undertone to it. "My sensors registered that you were waking, and I am programmed to respond in this way to this particular set of circumstances. Please, do not fret."

Hermione was only half listening, as by now, she'd realised that she was not in her own flesh. She had all sorts of creaks and groans that she was unused to, though the actual frame was equally as strong, if not stronger, than that of her own body. In her own mind, too, she was panicking about the lack of magic; that ever familiar fizz was absent from her blood. 

"Where am I?" she asked, her voice startling her with its deep timbre. She sat up, staring around at the bright, white walls, the screen over the bed, the vast expanse of glass. Outside, the sight of the sun rising, pink and orange, over soaring skyscrapers shocked her to her core. 

"Welcome to Stark Tower," the robotic voice said pleasantly. "You may find the book in the bottom drawer of the bedside table of some assistance."

Always grateful for information, Hermione leaned over, desperately trying to ignore the unfamiliarity of her thickly furred arms. The drawer was full of shiny metallic parts, some of them stabbing into her skin as she rifled through. From the bottom, she pulled a battered old notebook. 

The first page was littered with notes, written in an inelegant scrawl and crossed out in multiple places. The following pages were the same, a stream of consciousness from the mind of someone who thought quickly, knew much, and was distracted easily. Sentences ran the gamut from personal information, to ideas for new tech, to complaints about people with strange names - who would name a child Dum-E? - to blurred rants, splashed with dark stains. One paragraph lamented the reader for having left him waiting, while another doubted her existence at all. 

She was sucked in, learning everything she could about the man who'd written this. Reading it was like falling through his mind, over a span of years and years, from his youth through now. 

She was so absorbed that she completely missed the door opening, until a shout startled her into dropping the book. 

"Hey! That's not for you!" 

There was a tall blonde man in the doorway, and was it completely inappropriate of Hermione to be attracted to him while in her soul mate's body? Because, strangely, she was; the pull was viciously strong, begging her to climb out of bed and straight into his arms. She shook herself out of it, frowning. 

"I'm sorry, are you -" 

"How much did you read?" The blonde steamrolled over her, barging into the room. His face looked funny, like his features were fitting wrong. Hermione recognised the look easily - it was one her undercover aurors wore in the first days of a polyjuice regimen. It took a while for them to learn how to mimic the target's facial expressions, and until that time, everything they did or said seemed faintly wrong. 

"I assume this is _ your _body," she said, dryly. Seeing he was still waiting for an answer, and most impatiently, she closed the book and dropped it to the bedcover, raising her hands calmly. "I was only doing what your butler told me to do. Where is he, anyway? In the walls?" 

"Very funny, Rogers," the blonde snapped, his eyes glued to the book. They were hard to read, but Hermione thought there was something morose about him, as if something he hadn't known he wanted had been ripped away. His eyes flicked back to her. "Stop looking at me like that. It looks weird."

"My apologies," she replied smoothly. "Am I to suppose you're Tony Stark?" 

"Of course I-" his disgruntled words came to a halt, and he peered at her suspiciously. "You don't sound like Rogers."

"That would be because I'm not." Hermione tried her most winning smile, which, she had to admit, had never been all that successful. Stark didn't seem to like it, because he recoiled, then stopped. 

"Did I seriously just get hot looking at myself smile?" he muttered. One hand came up and scrubbed at his neck. "Fuck. One thing at a time. If you're not Rogers, who are you, where is he, and what are you doing in my body?" 

Hermione stood, because she was beginning to feel awkward just sitting about like this while he had an existential crisis, and extended a hand, because what else was she meant to do?

"I'm Hermione Granger, apparently your soul mate. And, if what I'm seeing out there is correct-" she gestured blindly back at the window, "-this 'Rogers' must be in _ my _ body, back in London." Suddenly, she froze. Oh, _ shit. _

"In my _ magical _body, in London, asleep at my desk. At work. In the biggest magical law enforcement unit in London." 

She and Tony locked eyes. 

"_ Fuck," _ they swore, together _ . _

* * *

Steve hadn't been having a great morning. 

It was his thirtieth birthday. Wa-hoo! He'd been waiting for this for eighty years, and with some excitement. He'd always known he had a soul mate, even back in the thirties - it fit into his being, his knowledge that he was meant for something bigger than just being that sickly boy on the block. For a while, he'd thought that mate might have been Peggy, and that had been an exciting ideal, but then he'd died, been frozen, and had woken up in the twenty first century. 

The idea that Peggy might be his soul mate had stopped being so much a dream as a living nightmare. 

He'd woken up, damp and sweating, more than one night after dreaming that he'd been in her body - crippled and dying and old - destined to watch his soul mate die, after living a life apart from him. Even after knowing that she'd found her soul mate years back, the fear had continued. That maybe it should have been him. Maybe he'd missed his chance. 

That had been horrifying, bone chilling, a dark shadow over his days. 

The real thing? 

Terrifying in an entirely different way. 

And if he was honest, super irritating, too. 

His day had begun with a bad back, as he'd come to consciousness bent over a desk, drooling on a ledger. A mass of dark hair had blocked his vision, and when he'd sat up and pushed it back, the quills - _ quills - _pens and ink the stuff had collected overnight stabbed at him and smeared his hands. Obviously, his soul mate's hair hated him. 

A quick search of her desk had turned up correspondence written to Hermione Granger, Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement; an address in London that must be her apartment; a blocky old phone; and a thin stick that he knew to be a wand. 

The existence of magic was a classified matter, but Fury had written the Avengers in on it after an incident with a rogue dragon over Ohio had led to their involvement. He knew the theory, but had never met a witch, before. He was… Kind of excited.

Though, that might have been the antsy, jittery feeling in his blood, as if it was a living thing within him, fighting to get out. He needed to get some control over this - and the best way to do that, he thought brightly, would be to contact his soul mate! After several failed attempts, he finally managed to get a call out, desperate to connect with his other half - only to reach Tony Stark. Weird, but do-able, except he kept _ putting the damn phone down _.

Steve had then decided to walk, to try and calm his anxiety, and that was where it all went wrong. 

He'd found himself locked in the office by a magical barrier on the door. It had a similar feeling to the jumping in his veins, but never having done magic before, he'd not wanted to risk it. 

Not for an hour, anyway. But as the clock ticked onwards, he'd gotten antsy, and thought… What harm could it do? 

A fair bit, was the answer. 

He'd waved the wand a little, focusing on getting out of the office, and succeeded in blowing the wall open. The magical barrier, however, had remained. And that was how the other Aurors had found him.

"He's in here?" a familiar voice said from down the hallway from his cell, something straight out of an old movie he'd seen once with a Sheriff's office in it. Right down to the steel plank that served as a bed. 

"Tony?" Steve shouted. "Is that you?" 

"Oi!" The redheaded auror who'd taken such pleasure in arresting him shouted, rapping his knuckles against the bars. "Nobody asked you, bodysnatcher."

"Spot on reference, Ron, but that's not really what the film is about," Tony's voice rang out again, a note of calmness to it that he'd never heard before. "Leave the poor man alone."

He crossed into Steve's line of vision, sort of gliding along, head held high. He hadn't looked at Steve yet, instead keeping challenging eye contact with the auror. 

"Who're you?" Ron asked suspiciously. 

"Ron, you prat. It's Hermione." Tony glanced at his body and grimaced. "Granted, I don't look much like myself at the moment, but surely you recognise your best friend of twenty-five years, even if she does have a bit of stubble." He sniffed, delicately derisive. 

Steve's head was spinning. So this was Hermione, but if she was in Tony's body, and he was in hers, that meant Tony was in his. 

Which meant Tony Stark was his soul mate. 

_ Dear God. _ To call his and Tony's relationship _ contentious _was an understatement. 

Hermione-in-Tony shot him a sympathetic smile. “My, but you have gotten yourself into a predicament here. I was quite attached to that wall, you know.” She winked at him. "Oh, don't look so sad. It's easily mended."

“So you'll let him off, but not me? I see we're playing favourites already,” Steve’s own voice said, uncharacteristically haughty. Hermione shot him an exasperated look as he, too, stopped outside the cell.

“He exploded a wall. _You _put an entire fleet of jets out of service!”

“It's not my fault he's stupidly strong!”

“It's your fault that you’re an _idiot_.”

“Hey, we just met. You’re supposed to find me charming and charismatic. The idiot part comes later - after I've seen you naked, at least.”

Steve couldn’t help smiling at their banter, even in his position. Yeah, it was a bit weird, them all being in each other’s bodies and everything; it was all a little _ off_, but there was already a touch of fondness in their voices, the gentle ribbing tripping off their tongues, and he knew that they would be alright. He could love these people. Already loved Tony a little bit, if he was honest with himself. And if they had a bit of history to work through? Well, it seemed Hermione would be a great mediator - running a department of violent thugs as she did.

He couldn’t help glaring at his jailor when he remembered his situation. 

“It’s real nice to meet you, doll,” he said to the girl in Tony’s body, “but d’ya think you could get me outta here? I’d like to kiss you, now, and those bars look uncomfortable.”

Tony’s face broke out into a radiant smile, and Steve caught his breath. Boy, if she looked like that in _ Tony’s _ body, and if Tony looked like _ that _when he was happy…

Yeah. He was going to be just fine.


End file.
